Opinion page editor Rick Holmes and other writers blog about national politics and issues. Holmes & Co. is a Blog for Independent Minds, a place for a free-flowing discussion of policy, news and opinion. This blog is the online cousin of the Opinion
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Opinion page editor Rick Holmes and other writers blog about national politics and issues. Holmes & Co. is a Blog for Independent Minds, a place for a free-flowing discussion of policy, news and opinion. This blog is the online cousin of the Opinion section of the MetroWest Daily News in Framingham, Mass. As such, our focus starts there and spreads to include Massachusetts, the nation and the world. Since successful blogs create communities of readers and writers, we hope the \x34& Co.\x34 will also come to include you.

“Now that we have won the means to express ourselves, our responsibility to ourselves and to the country is paramount….The task for each of us is to think carefully about what he wants to say and gradually to shape the spirit of his paper; it is to write carefully without ever losing sight of the urgent need to restore to the country its authoritative voice. If we see to it that that voice remains one of vigor, rather than hatred, of proud objectivity and not rhetoric, of humanity rather than mediocrity, then much will be saved from ruin.”
~Albert Camus

Maybe I’m only being sentimental and wanting to acknowledge the guy’s birthday. I heard a piece on the radio reminding that today is Albert Camus’ 100th birthday. I woke from there and went a place where I’d set aside some of my favorites from his writing: his journals, essays, his Nobel acceptance speech. It occurs to me now I’d actually been thinking about him for a while, if not by name. Just a short while back we saw the passing of the poet Seamus Heaney. I noticed then that the testimony that came forward from the poet’s friends and readers far and wide was to a man who could combine uncompromising art and an expansive generous heart. Though he wasn’t one taken to the sides in conflict —even coming from the north of Ireland— his was a political existence of a sort —the kind much needed. Political in that it saw beyond the political.
It strikes me this morning that this appreciation offered Heaney —at least for me— extends from thinking I first encountered in Camus. That rigorous truth annealed in love. Not shying from conflict for want of courage, but wanting beyond it for the sake of humanity. That’s what I read in ‘Letters to a German Friend’ and ‘The Rebel’ —there was that complexity and even contradiction that bespeaks truth rather than certainty —the key point to separate him from Sartre, by the way.

“Here I understand what they call glory. The right to love without limits.”